Some time ago I wrote: What I would love to hear are some examples ... financial innovation—not of any kind, but of the kind that has left a large enough footprint over some kind of economic outcomes we really care about. What are some of the ways in which financial innovation has made our liv...

The language of "growth diagnostics" and of "removing binding constraints" is becoming so commonplace in multilateral agencies and donor organizations these days that I sometimes wonder whether we have not unleashed something out to the real world before its time. The trouble is that what I see ...

If Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali or Egypt's Hosni Mubarak were hoping for political popularity as a reward for economic gains, they must have been sorely disappointed. Their people have just sent a sobering message to China and other authoritarian regimes around the world: don’t count on eco...

This isn't the greatest interview I ever gave, but it is on an interesting and challenging question: is it ever OK for an academic to work with and give advice to an authoritarian regime? My answer, despite the outcry against Harvard academics' relationship with Libya, is "yes" – although there ...

(This is the Afterword that appears in my book The Globalization Paradox. It is an attempt to state the book's central argument in the form of a bedtime story.) Once upon a time there was a little fishing village at the edge of a lake. The villagers were poor, living off the fish they caught an...

I can't seem to get off this topic. This time my excuse is Maggie McMillan of Tufts, who rebukes me for having missed an opportunity to point out an important contradiction in the empirical literature surrounding the question of what a rise in food prices does to the world's poor. Maggie, who...

David Leonhardt of the New York Times surveyed economists to find out, and he says the answer is definitely yes: I received dozens of diverse responses, but there was still a runaway winner. The small group of economists who work at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T., led by Esther Duflo a...

On insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), at least. There has been an ongoing battle between Sachs and segments of the global public health community on the appropriate delivery mechanisms for ITNs. The efficacy of ITNs in preventing malaria exposure is not in question. What has been debated is...

I can't seem to get off this topic. This time my excuse is Maggie McMillan of Tufts, who rebukes me for having missed an opportunity to point out an important contradiction in the empirical literature surrounding the question of what a rise in food prices does to the world's poor. Maggie, who...

Johan Swinnen responds to Oxfam: Let me start by thanking Dani Rodrik for putting a reference and summary of my report on his weblog. I also want to thank Mr. Bailey from Oxfam for his response and reference to two Oxfam reports. In fact, unlike Mr. Bailey’s claim that they contradict my argumen...

(This is the Afterword that appears in my book The Globalization Paradox. It is an attempt to state the book's central argument in the form of a bedtime story.) Once upon a time there was a little fishing village at the edge of a lake. The villagers were poor, living off the fish they caught an...

I can't seem to get off this topic. This time my excuse is Maggie McMillan of Tufts, who rebukes me for having missed an opportunity to point out an important contradiction in the empirical literature surrounding the question of what a rise in food prices does to the world's poor. Maggie, who...

The town of Trento holds an annual Festival of Economics every year around this time, and I was one of the speakers this time around. A Festival(!) of Economics -- what an idea... But here it works amazingly well. Where else would you see the local townspeople -- grandfather, moms with their b...

Guy Sorman's review of my book The Globalization Paradox has one good turn of phrase at the beginning, where he calls me "a liberal mugged by globalization." But from my perspective it is all downhill from there. I provide the link to the review in the interest of equal time for my critics. The...

This graph is from a new paper by Frank Levy and Tom Kochan, showing trends in labor productivity and compensation since 1980: Labor productivity increased by 78 percent between 1980 and 2009, but the median compensation (including fringe benefits) of 35-44 year-old males with high school (a...

Paul Krugman tries to locate a sensible middle ground between anti-globalists and knee-jerk free traders: Those who think that globalization is always and everywhere a bad thing are wrong. On the contrary, keeping world markets relatively open is crucial to the hopes of billions of people. But ...

Johns Hopkins SAIS has put up a video of my talk there yesterday on "The Globalization Paradox" and you can watch it here. You can barely see me, give the positioning of the camera, but at least the audio is pretty clear.

My newest Project Syndicate column was stimulated, if that is the right word, by a comment made by a discussant at a recent book launch for The Globalization Paradox. "Rodrik wants to make the world safe for politicians," complained the discussant, and this set me off thinking. Here is the resul...

I was at the Peterson Institute recently, hosted by Fred Bergsten at a book-launching event for The Globalization Paradox. The video of my presentation is here, and here is the Powerpoint that goes with it.

Development economics is split between macro- and micro-development economists. The former focus on economic growth and tend to analyze economy-wide policies such as trade, fiscal, and currency policies. Think Anne Krueger, Jeff Sachs, Bill Easterly, Paul Collier. The latter focus on individu...

This one comes from Bob Kuttner of The American Prospect. [Rodrik’s] new book, The Globalization Paradox, is simply the best recent treatment of the globalization dilemma that I've read, by an economist or anyone else. The paradox of his title is the fact that markets need states, but states ar...

My last post left a few loose ends, so let me clarify and amplify. First, Albert Hirschman is very much with us, although in failing health. He could not attend yesterday's event in his honor, although his wonderful wife Sarah Hirschman and many members of the Hirschman family were there. It was...

Poor countries have access to new technologies already developed elsewhere so should grow more rapidly than richer economies. This is one of the implications of standard growth models, as well as of common sense. But in reality, there is no automatic tendency for economic "convergence" among co...

The absurdities of the Ergenekon investigation in Turkey have reached even greater heights. Now investigators are after every single copy of a draft book by the journalist Ahmet Şık (titled The Imam’s Army), which reportedly describes infiltration of the police and judiciary by Fethullah Gülen’...

I spoke today at a panel on economic growth after the crisis at a conference organized by the IMF. My co-panelists were George Akerlof, Mike Spence, Andrew Sheng, and Paul Romer. In the audience: Bob Solow, Joe Stiglitz, Olivier Blanchard, and many others. In retrospect, it was probably a mistak...